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Kevin Ryan on "9/11 In Context" on Resistance Radio Network
by Tod Fletcher at 911blogger.com blog

On "9/11 In Context", which aired Thursday, Nov. 18, at 3pm ET, I interviewed Kevin Ryan about his important research into the WTC physical evidence, especially the WTC dust, as well as his remarkable investigations into the complex network of corporate tenants of the WTC and the select group of "experts" who repeatedly surface to defend the official account of the buildings' destruction.

Kevin is one of the most productive researchers in the 9/11 truth movement.
He brings together his extensive experience as a professional chemist, the capability
to penetrate obscure corporate and professional networks, and a deep sense of
moral obligation to uncover the truth about the 9/11 events. Don't miss this
interview! It is sure to be worthwhile.

Just after September 11th 2001, many governments began investigations into
possible insider trading related to the terrorist attacks of that day. Such
investigations were initiated by the governments of Belgium, Cyprus, France,
Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Monte Carlo, the Netherlands, Switzerland,
the United States, and others. Although the investigators were clearly concerned
about insider trading, and considerable evidence did exist, none of the investigations
resulted in a single indictment. That's because the people identified
as having been involved in the suspicious trades were seen as unlikely to have
been associated with those alleged to have committed the 9/11 crimes.

This is an example of the circular logic often used by those who created the
official explanations for 9/11. The reasoning goes like this: if we assume that
we know who the perpetrators were (i.e. the popular version of "al Qaeda")
and those who were involved in the trades did not appear to be connected to
those assumed perpetrators, then insider trading did not occur.

That's basically what the 9/11 Commission told us. The Commission concluded
that "exhaustive investigations" by the SEC and the FBI "uncovered
no evidence that anyone with advance knowledge of the attacks profited through
securities transactions." What they meant was that someone did profit
through securities transactions but, based on the Commission's assumptions
of guilt, those who profited were not associated with those who were guilty
of conducting the attacks. In a footnote, the Commission report acknowledged
"highly suspicious trading on its face," but said that this trading
on United Airlines was traced back to "A single U.S.-based institutional
investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda."1

With respect to insider trading, or what is more technically called informed
trading, the Commission report was itself suspect for several reasons. First,
the informed trades relating to 9/11 covered far more than just airline company
stock. The stocks of financial and reinsurance companies, as well as other financial
vehicles, were identified as being associated with suspicious trades. Huge credit
card transactions, completed just before the attacks, were also involved. The
Commission ultimately tried to frame all of this highly suspicious trading in
terms of a series of misunderstandings. However, the possibility that so many
leading financial experts were so completely wrong is doubtful at best and,
if true, would constitute another unbelievable scenario in the already highly
improbable sequence of events represented by the official story of 9/11.

In the last few years, new evidence has come to light on these matters. In
2006 and 2010, financial experts at a number of universities have established
new evidence, through statistical analyses, that informed trades did occur with
respect to the 9/11 attacks. Additionally, in 2007, the 911 Commission released
a memorandum summary of the FBI investigations on which its report was based.2
A careful review of this memorandum indicates that some of the people who were
briefly investigated by the FBI, and then acquitted without due diligence, had
links to al Qaeda and to US intelligence agencies. Although the elapsed time
between the informed trades and these new confirmations might prevent legal
action against the guilty, the facts of the matter can help lead us to the truth
about 9/11.

Early signs

Within a week of the attacks, Germany's stock market regulator, BAWe,
began looking into claims of suspicious trading.3 That same week, Italy's
foreign minister, Antonio Martino, made it clear that he had concerns by issuing
this public statement: "I think that there are terrorist states and organisations
behind speculation on the international markets."4

Within two weeks of the attacks, CNN reported that regulators were seeing "ever-clearer
signs" that someone "manipulated financial markets ahead of the
terror attack in the hope of profiting from it." Belgian Finance Minister,
Didier Reynders, said that there were strong suspicions that British markets
were used for transactions.5 The CIA was reported to have asked the British
regulators to investigate some of the trades.6 Unfortunately, the British
regulator, The Financial Services Authority, wrote off its investigation by
simply clearing "bin Laden and his henchmen of insider trading."7

Conversely, German central bank president, Ernst Welteke, said his bank conducted
a study that strongly indicated "terrorism insider trading" associated
with 9/11. He stated that his researchers had found "almost irrefutable
proof of insider trading."8 Welteke suggested that the insider trading
occurred not only in shares of companies affected by the attacks, such as airlines
and insurance companies, but also in gold and oil. 9

The extent of the 9/11-related informed trading was unprecedented. An ABC News
Consultant, Jonathan Winer, said, "it's absolutely unprecedented
to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan to the
US to North America to Europe."10

By October 2001, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and the four other
options exchanges in the US had joined forces with the FBI and the Securities
and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate a list of 38 stocks, as well as
multiple options and Treasury bonds, that were flagged in relation to potential
informed trades. SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt gave testimony to the House Financial
Services Committee at the time, saying, "We will do everything in our
power to track those people down and bring them to justice."11

Mary Bender, chief regulatory officer at the CBOE, stated "We've
never really had anything like this, [the option exchanges are] using the same
investigative tools as we would in an insider-trading case. The point is to
find people who are connected to these heinous crimes."

The people ultimately found included an unnamed customer of Deutsche Bank Alex.
Brown (DBAB). This involved a trade on United Airlines (UAL) stock consisting
of a 2,500-contract order that was, for some reason, split into chunks of 500
contracts each and then directed to multiple exchanges around the country simultaneously.12
When the 9/11 Commission report pointed to a "single U.S.-based institutional
investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda," it was referring to either
DBAB or its customer in that questionable trade.

Michael Ruppert has since written about DBAB, noting that the company had previously
been a financier of The Carlyle Group and also of Brown Brothers Harriman, both
of which are companies closely related to the Bush family. Ruppert also noted
that Alex. Brown, the company purchased by Deutsche Bank to become DBAB, was
managed by A.B. (Buzzy) Krongard, who left the firm in 1998 to join the CIA
as counsel to director George Tenet.13 Krongard had been a consultant to CIA
director James Woolsey in the mid 1990s and, on September 11th, he was the Executive
Director of the CIA, the third highest position in the agency.

Stock and Treasury bonds traded

In 2002, investigator Kyle Hence wrote about the stocks involved in the SEC's
target list. Those that had the highest examples of trade volume over the average
were UAL [285 times over average], Marsh & McLennan (Marsh) [93 times over
average], American Airlines (AMR) [60 times over average], and Citigroup [45
times over average].14 Other stocks flagged included financial firms, defense-related
companies, and the reinsurance firms Munich Re, Swiss Re and the AXA Group.
Put options for these reinsurance firms, or bets that the stock would drop,
were placed at double the normal levels in the few days before the attacks.
Regulators were concerned about "large block trades" on these stocks
because the three firms were liable for billions in insurance payouts due to
the damage inflicted on 9/11.15

The four highest-volume suspect stocks -- UAL, Marsh, AMR and Citigroup
-- were closely linked to the attacks of 9/11. The two airline companies
each had two planes hijacked and destroyed. Marsh was located in the exact 8
floors out of 110 in the north tower of the WTC where Flight 11 impacted and
the fires occurred. Citigroup was the parent of Travelers Insurance, which was
expected to see $500 million in claims, and also Salomon Smith Barney, which
occupied all but ten floors in World Trade Center (WTC) building 7. Oddly enough,
Salomon Smith Barney had both Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney on its advisory
board until January 2001.

Marsh occupied a number of floors in the south tower as well. This is where
the office of Marsh executive, L. Paul Bremer, was located. Bremer was a former
managing director at Kissinger Associates and had just completed leading a national
terrorism commission in 2000. The San Francisco Chronicle noted that Bremer
was a source of early claims that rich Arabs were financing Osama bin Laden's
terrorist network. In an article on the 9/11 informed trades, the Chronicle
reported that "The former chairman of the State Department's National
Commission on Terrorism, L. Paul Bremer, said he obtained classified government
analyses early last year of bin Laden's finances confirming the assistance
of affluent Middle Easterners."16

On the day of 9/11, Bremer was interviewed by NBC News and stated that he believed
Osama bin Laden was responsible and that possibly Iraq and Iran were involved
too, and he called for the most severe military response possible. For unknown
reasons, Google removed the interview video from its servers three times, and
blocked it once.17

The trading of Treasury bonds just before 9/11 was also flagged as being suspicious.
Reporters from The Wall street Journal wrote that the "U.S. Secret Service
contacted a number of bond traders regarding large purchases of five-year Treasury
notes before the attacks, according to people familiar with the probe. The investigators,
acting on a tip from traders, are examining whether terrorists, or people affiliated
with terrorist organizations, bought five-year notes, including a single $5
billion trade."18

Some reports claimed that the 9/11 informed trades were such that millions
of dollars were made, and some of that went unclaimed.19 Others suggested
that the trades resulted in the winning of billions of dollars in profits. One
such suggestion was made by the former German Minister of Technology, Andreas
von Buelow, who said that the value of the informed trades was on the order
of $15 billion.20

The FBI Investigations

In May 2007, a 9/11 Commission document that summarized the FBI investigations
into potential 9/11-related informed trading was declassified.21 This document
was redacted to remove the names of two FBI agents from the New York office,
and to remove the names of select suspects in the informed trading investigations.
The names of other FBI agents and suspects were left in. Regardless, some information
can be gleaned from the document to help reveal the trades and traders investigated.

On September 21, 2001, the SEC referred two specific transactions to the FBI
for criminal investigation as potential informed trades. One of those trades
was a September 6, 2001 purchase of 56,000 shares of a company called Stratesec,
which in the few years before 9/11 was a security contractor for several of
the facilities that were compromised on 9/11. These facilities included the
WTC buildings, Dulles airport, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off, and
also United Airlines, which owned two of the other three ill-fated planes.

The affected 56,000 shares of Stratesec stock were purchased by a director
of the company, Wirt D. Walker III, and his wife Sally Walker. This is clear
from the memorandum generated to record the FBI summary of the trades investigated.22
The Stratesec stock that the Walkers purchased doubled in value in the one trading
day between September 11th and when the stock market reopened on September 17th.
The Commission memorandum suggests that the trade generated a profit of $50,000
for the Walkers. Unfortunately, the FBI did not interview either of the Walkers
and they were both cleared of any wrongdoing because they were said to have
"no ties to terrorism or other negative information.".23

However, Wirt Walker was connected to people who had connections to al Qaeda.
For example, Stratesec director James Abrahamson was the business partner of
Mansoor Ijaz, who claimed on several occasions to be able to contact Osama bin
Laden.24 Additionally, Walker hired a number of Stratesec employees away from
a subsidiary of The Carlyle Group called BDM International, which ran secret
(black) projects for government agencies. The Carlyle Group was partly financed
by members of the bin Laden family.25 Mr. Walker ran a number of suspicious
companies that went bankrupt, including Stratesec, some of which were underwritten
by a company run by a first cousin of former CIA director (and President) George
H.W. Bush. Additionally, Walker was the child of a CIA employee and his first
job was at an investment firm run by former US intelligence guru, James "Russ"
Forgan, where he worked with another former CIA director, William Casey.26
Of course, Osama bin Laden had links to the CIA as well.27

Another trade investigated by the FBI, on request from the SEC, focused on
Amir Ibrahim Elgindy, an Egyptian-born, San Diego stock advisor who on the day
before 9/11 had allegedly attempted to liquidate $300,000 in assets through
his broker at Salomon Smith Barney. During the attempted liquidation, Elgindy
was said to have "predicted that the Dow Jones industrial average, which
at the time stood at about 9,600, would soon crash to below 3,000."28

The 9/11 Commission memorandum suggests that the FBI never interviewed Mr.
Elgindy either, and had planned to exonerate him because there was "no
evidence he was seeking to establish a position whereby he would profit from
the terrorist attacks." Apparently, the prediction of a precipitous drop
in the stock market, centered on the events of 9/11, was not sufficient cause
for the FBI to interview the suspect.

In late May 2002, Elgindy was arrested along with four others, including an
FBI agent and a former FBI agent, and charged with conspiracy to manipulate
stock prices and extort money from companies. The FBI agents, Jeffrey A Royer
and Lynn Wingate, were said to have "used their access to F.B.I. databases
to monitor the progress of the criminal investigation against Mr. Elgindy."29
A federal prosecutor later accused Elgindy, who also went by several aliases,
of having prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Although the judge in that case
did not agree with the prosecutor on the 9/11 informed trading accusation, Mr.
Elgindy was eventually convicted, in 2005, of multiple crimes including racketeering,
securities fraud, and making false statements.

The Boston office of the FBI investigated stock trades related to two companies.
The first was Viisage Technologies, a facial recognition company that stood
to benefit from an increase in terrorism legislation. The Viisage purchase,
made by a former employee of the Saudi American Bank, "revealed no connection
with 9/11." However, the Saudi American Bank was named in a lawsuit brought
by the 9/11 victims' families due to the bank having -- "financed
development projects in Sudan benefiting bin Laden in the early 1990s."30

The second company investigated by the Boston FBI office was Wellington Management,
a company that allegedly held a large account for Osama bin Laden. The FBI found
that Wellington Management maintained an account for "members of the bin
Laden family" but dropped the investigation because it could not link
this to "Osama, al Qaeda, or terrorism."31

Although the connections to al Qaeda in three of these cases (Walker, the Viisage
trader, and Wellington Management) can be seen as circumstantial, the amount
of such evidence is considerable. The quality of the FBI investigations, considering
the suspects were not even interviewed, was therefore much less than "exhaustive",
as the 9/11 Commission characterized it.

The summary of FBI investigations released by the 9/11 Commission also described
how the Commission questioned the FBI about damaged computer hard drives that
might have been recovered from the WTC. This questioning was the result of "press
reports [contending] that large volumes of suspicious transactions flowed through
the computers housed in the WTC on the morning of 9/11 as part of some illicit
but ill-defined effort to profit from the attacks."32 The Commission
came to the conclusion that no such activity occurred because "the assembled
agents expressed no knowledge of the reported hard-drive recovery effort"
and "everything at the WTC was pulverized to near powder, making it extremely
unlikely that any hard-drives survived."

The truth, however, is that many such hard-drives were recovered from the WTC
and were sent to specialist companies to be cleaned and have data recovered.
A German company named Convar did a good deal of the recovery work.

In December 2001, Reuters reported that "Convar has recovered information
from 32 computers that support assumptions of dirty doomsday dealings."
Richard Wagner, a data retrieval expert at Convar, testified that "There
is a suspicion that some people had advance knowledge of the approximate time
of the plane crashes in order to move out amounts exceeding $100 million. They
thought that the records of their transactions could not be traced after the
main frames were destroyed." Director of Convar, Peter Henschel, said
that it was "not only the volume, but the size of the transactions [that]
was far higher than usual for a day like that."33

By late December 2001, Convar had completed processing 39 out of 81 drives,
and expected to receive 20 more WTC hard drives the next month. Obviously, the
911 Commission memorandum drafted in August 2003 was not particularly reliable
considering it reported that the FBI and the 911 Commission had no knowledge
of any of this.

Statistical confirmations

Considering that the FBI and 9/11 Commission overlooked the suspicious connections
of informed trading suspects like Wirt Walker, and also claimed in 2003 to have
no knowledge of hard drive recoveries publicly reported in 2001, we must assume
that they did a poor job of investigating. Today, however, we know that several
peer-reviewed academic papers have reported solid evidence that informed trades
did occur. That is, the conclusions reached by the official investigations have
now been shown, through scientific analysis, to be quite wrong.

In 2006, a professor of Finance from the University of Illinois named Allen
Poteshman published an analysis of the airline stock option trades preceding
the attacks. This study came to the conclusion that an indicator of long put
volume was "unusually high which is consistent with informed investors
having traded in the option market in advance of the attacks."34 Long
puts are bets that a stock or option will fall in price.

The unusually high volume of long puts, purchased on UAL and AMR stock before
these stocks declined dramatically due to the 9/11 attacks, are evidence that
the traders knew that the stocks would decline. Using statistical techniques
to evaluate conditional and unconditional distributions of historical stock
option activity, Professor Poteshman showed that the data indicate that informed
trading did occur.

In January 2010, a team of financial experts from Switzerland published evidence
for at least thirteen informed trades in which the investors appeared to have
had foreknowledge of the attacks. This study focused again on a limited number
of companies but, of those, the informed trades centered on five airline companies
and four financial companies. The airline companies were American Airlines,
United Airlines and Boeing. Three of the financial companies involved were located
in the WTC towers and the fourth was Citigroup, which stood to lose doubly as
the parent of both Travelers Insurance and the WTC 7 tenant, Salomon Smith Barney.35

More recently, in April 2010, an international team of experts examined trading
activities of options on the Standard & Poors 500 index, as well as a volatility
index of the CBOE called VIX. These researchers showed that there was a significant
abnormal increase in trading volume in the option market just before the 9/11
attacks, and they demonstrated that this was in contrast to the absence of abnormal
trading volume over periods long before the attacks. The study also showed that
the relevant abnormal increase in trading volume was not simply due to a declining
market.36 Their findings were "consistent with insiders anticipating
the 9-11 attacks."

Conclusion

In the early days just after 9/11, financial regulators around the world gave
testimony to unprecedented evidence for informed trading related to the terrorist
attacks of that day. One central bank president (Welteke) said there was irrefutable
proof of such trading. This evidence led US regulators to vow, in Congressional
testimony, to bring those responsible to justice. Those vows were not fulfilled,
as the people in charge of the investigations let the suspects off the hook
by conducting weak inquiries and concluding that informed trading could not
have occurred if it was not done directly by Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda.

The "exhaustive investigations" conducted by the FBI, on which
the 9/11 Commission report was based, were clearly bogus. The FBI did not interview
the suspects and did not appear to compare notes with the 9/11 Commission to
help make a determination if any of the people being investigated might have
had ties to al Qaeda. The Commission's memorandum summary suggests that
the FBI simply made decisions on its own regarding the possible connections
of the suspects and the alleged terrorist organizations. Those unilateral decisions
were not appropriate, as at least three of the suspected informed trades (those
of Walker, the Viisage trader, and Wellington Management) involved reasonably
suspicious links to Osama bin Laden or his family. Another suspect (Elgindy)
was a soon-to-be convicted criminal who had direct links to FBI employees who
were later arrested for securities-related crimes.

The FBI also claimed in August 2003 that it had no knowledge of hard drives
recovered from the WTC, which were publicly reported in 2001. According to the
people who retrieved the associated data, the hard drives gave evidence for
"dirty doomsday dealings."

The evidence for informed trading on 9/11 includes many financial vehicles,
from stock options to Treasury bonds to credit card transactions made at the
WTC just before it was destroyed. Today we know that financial experts from
around the world have provided strong evidence, through established and reliable
statistical techniques, that the early expert suspicions were correct, and that
9/11 informed trading did occur.

People knew in advance about the crimes of 9/11, and they profited from that
knowledge. Those people are among us today, and our families and communities
are at risk of future terrorist attacks and further criminal profiteering if
we do not respond to the evidence. It is time for an independent, international
investigation into the informed trades and the traders who benefited from the
terrorist acts of September 11th.

8Paul Thompson and The Center for Cooperative Research, Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11 – and America’s Response, Harper Collins, 2004. Also found at History Commons, Complete 9/11 Timeline, Insider Trading and Other Foreknowledgehttp://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&before_9/11=insidertrading

20Tagesspiegel, Former German Cabinet Minister Attacks Official Brainwashing On September 11 Issue Points at "Mad Dog" Zbig and Huntington, 13 January 2002, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/VonBuelow.html

22The 9/11 Commission memorandum that summarized the FBI investigations refers to the traders involved in the Stratesec purchase. From the references in the document, we can make out that the two people had the same last name and were related. This fits the description of Wirt and Sally Walker, who are known to be stock holders in Stratesec. Additionally, one (Wirt) was a director at the company, a director at a publicly traded company in Oklahoma (Aviation General), and chairman of an investment firm in Washington, DC (Kuwam Corp).

36Wing-Keung Wong, et al, Was there Abnormal Trading in the S&P 500 Index Options Prior to the September 11 Attacks?, Social Sciences Research Network, April 2010, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1588523

Kevin R. Ryan began to investigate the tragedy of September 11th, 2001 through his work as Site Manager for a division of Underwriters Laboratories (UL). He was fired by UL in 2004 for writing to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), asking about its World Trade Center investigation and UL's work to ensure the fire resistance of the buildings. He now serves as co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, and board director at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Ryan has co-authored several books and peer-reviewed scientific articles on the subject. Read more articles by Kevin Ryan.

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